Hi Justin and incubator, Thank you for the feedback.
1. We fully intend to address the licensing issues in releases and software distributions as part of our efforts towards graduation. 2. To my knowledge, there was no intention from this PPMC to bypass the software release policy. To clarify on 2: - MXNet publishes only nightly pre-release builds to dist.mxnet.io for the verification purpose for projects in the ecosystem and for developers who work on the bleeding edge. - PyPI releases are not the act of this PPMC, but are from individuals acting as third-party for the convenience of the community. The binary releases there are not from dist.mxnet.io, but are produced from the same or similar build scripts without modification to the source code. - We made a mistake on Maven releases that we took the same solution as PyPI without carefully reviewing that it complies with the license requirement. With my PPMC hat off, as the individual who made releases to PyPI: - I do NOT intend to confuse the users of our PyPI releases to be the act of MXNet PPMC as I didn't use the apache-mxnet as PyPI package name, which is specified by the draft policy on releases [1]. I will initiate review with Apache Trademark to make sure it is clear. - I do NOT intend to confuse the users of our PyPI releases to be under Apache License 2.0 and it's an artifact from using the same build script. I will seek input from Apache Legal on LEGAL-515 to clarify what the proper licensing should be. With my PPMC hat on, we will take the following actions: - We will try to take down problematic Maven releases immediately and discuss in the community how to proceed with future Maven releases. - We will introduce source releases on PyPI and Maven using apache-mxnet name to provide users with the option to have Apache distribution and allow users to compile CUDA/cuDNN code as an option. Finally, we appreciate any lesson other projects can share on licensing and distribution that involves CUDA code. Thanks. Regards, Sheng On behalf of Apache MXNet (Incubating) PPMC On Fri, May 22, 2020 at 8:49 PM Justin Mclean <jmcl...@apache.org> wrote: > Hi, > > The incubator report had the following feedback: > Incubator needs to address the software distribution issues > regarding MXNet (not reporting this month). The PPMC is > effectively bypassing our software release policies by creating > distribution packages that are combined with non-open-source > platform libraries and publishing them on dist.mxnet.io, where > they are picked up and distributed using the PyPi channel to > all Python users. The resulting pages on PyPi mislead users > into thinking they are installing an Apache License 2.0 package > even though it contains software that we are not allowed to > distribute under our license. > https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-515 > https://dist.mxnet.io/python/cu102 > https://pypi.org/project/mxnet-cu102/ > > I can see you have been discussing this here [1] so some progress has been > made. It would be a good idea to keep the Incubator PMC in the loop on what > actions the PMC is going to take to resolve this. > > Thanks, > Justin > > 1. https://s.apache.org/5102c > >
